http://8tracks.com/lostpo...kaboom-box

Scroll down for my liner notes. For some reason, I can't add them to this edited post. I guess it's too much text.

.
[Edited 2/22/10 3:53am]

Early promo even! We orgers are an industrious bunch!

Damn

Now I feel bad I didn't invest time to learn about artwork making :doh2: Good job

^ looks like Keith Herring

The artwork for this round has fastly improved!

Dewrede said:

Yep. It's Keith Haring. It only existed in black & white - until I coloured it in... Thank God for the paintbucket fill.

http://www.revizoronline....lkul83.jpg

The font is called Jules Love. You can find it here:
http://www.dafont.com/jules-love.font

I spent about ten hours experimenting with different artwork. The Haring art was my last choice.

Okay... Here it is...

http://8tracks.com/lostpo...kaboom-box

These are the songs that scarred my childhood.

Listening to them now, they sound a bit silly, camp and throwaway. But you can't underestimate how terrifying these songs were at the time.

Growing-up in the 1980s was surreal, if you were a child born in the 1970s. Everything felt so scary. On one hand, you had the emergence of cable and satellite news channels, beaming real-life horror into your home 24/7, but you didn't yet have the security blanket of the internet. You know, it was a one-way conversation with the world...

I really think that today's kids are emotionally smarter because they have instant access to more than one viewpoint; more than one culture outside of the Anglosphere; just access to to the world in general. You really can't imagine how much of a "them and us" culture we were raised in, prior to the net. It was very, very insular.

A case in point would be 9/11. I remember the net going down at the time - it just crashed for an hour or two whilst events unfolded. But that evening, I was on a forum speaking with New Yorkers whose families were affected; and people from the Middle East whom were scared of Bush's reprisals. And I wept for both sides.

Anyhoo... Rewind back thirty years to the 1980s and it was a different picture. Foreigners were terrifying - especially so if they lived behind the iron curtain. Aside from the cold war, there was the emergence of AIDS and Green Issues. If "the bomb" didn't kill us all, sex or the weather would.

I know that these concerns haven't faded; only gathered speed. The difference being, is that the world thirty years ago was still incredibly naive - or at least England in the 1980s was. Today, we have a choice to blinker out the terror of impending doom. We now don't have to rely on just one point of view - we have access to millions of opinions online and we can choose to believe what we want to believe.

The country still had war rationing of food and medicine, well into the 1950s. It's not any accident that most Brits of a certain age have tombstone teeth. Britons still had a wartime mentality of "making do", well past 1942. Whilst Thatcher dragged the country, kicking and screaming into a world of Reagonomical privatisation, we were still getting over World War II.

At the start of the 1980s, the U.K. had only three tv channels; every business was closed on Sundays; most homes didn't even have a telephone.

By the end of the 1980s, we were more affluent; more worldly... and more blasé.

But for the ten years from 1980 to 1989, a bunker mentality perpetuated. And the songs of the day reflected this.

So, from a more innocent time when armageddon seemed more than likely on a daily basis, here is my mix.

.
[Edited 2/21/10 18:21pm]

GirlBrother said:

cool , you did a good job

http://8tracks.com/lostpo...kaboom-box

'Eighth Day' by Hazel O'Connor.

This brings back so many memories. It's from a film called Breaking Glass. I wonder what happened to Hazel O'Connor? Looking at the video now on YouTube, I'm getting a Lady GaGa vibe, visually.

The video was taken from the movie. I remember being eight years old and begging my mother to take me to the cinema to see the film. It was rated 18. I was 8. My mother refused to take me. I cried.

I settled for the 7" of this song. Me, my brother and sister used to organise pre-teen discos in our garage and we always saved this song for last, because it was the one song guaranteed to make the neighbourhood kids just lose it.

It's the aural equivalent of a disaster film. Even now, I'm unsure what she's singing about - but it sounds bloody terrifying. The machines man has made have become sentient and they're going to kill us all! Or something. lol

Russians by Sting

I think what's interesting about a lot of these 1980s snuff songs is that they name names. You know, there were always "disaster songs", like 'In The Year 2525', 'Mercy Mercy Me' or 'Ball of Confusion' but in the eighties, blame was laid.

I'm not a Sting fan. However, this song has a memorable melody and sums-up the mood of the period. I seem to recall my sister singing "I know the Russians eat their children stewed" whenever it was played on the radio. We laughed.

The Visitors (Crackin' Up) by ABBA

If other countries weren't going to "get you", your own country would.

This is the title track from ABBA's last album. Their popularity was on the wane, their relationships were strained... and it's a damned shame. The moody synth-pop on this album and the non-album single 'The Day Before You Came' was so influential - even today.

I'd listened to this song for years and had no idea what it was about, until recently. I'd assumed "the visitors" were ghosts of past relationships, or real-life partners of adulterous paramores. But no... It's actually about being in an Eastern Bloc country and spooks from the government coming to your door to spirit you away. Amazing that they'd gone from the fluffy 'Ring Ring' to this, in just under a decade.

Anni-Frid's voice is flanged to fuck. There's a weird eastern atonal quality to the melody on the verses which I associate with Madonna's 'Bedtime Story'.

Never before or since has political dissidence sounded so funky.

People Are Still Having Sex by La Tour

AIDS. This if the first song I remember hearing on the radio which even mentioned AIDS.

In 1984 or 1985, every home in the U.K. received a pamphlet, advising you what you had to know about preventing AIDS. I remember my mother asking if I'd read it. I was like 11 or something! The cover to the pamphlet had a gravestone-like slab on the cover, and inside there was talk of condoms and semen. I don't remember much else. Sex didn't exist in our house until the day that dropped through the door. It was as if somebody had shoved their erect dick through our letterbox and jizzed all over the door-mat.



The 1980s AIDS panic had a silver lining of course. It made discussion of sex more normalised and galvanised the gay rights movement (especially in the U.S.). It also had it's down-side (aside from the obvious). Thatcher's government introduced a law called Clause 28 which "banned the promotion of homosexuality from schools and colleges". This basically meant that schools pretended that homosexuality didn't exist.

The right-wing tabloid newspapers had a field day. There were witch-hunts centred on individual teachers and educational organisations. Every day, my 14 year-old self would open the newspapers to read that I was disgusting, immoral and perverted. It affected me deeply.

Anyway. This song is silly, poopy and cheesy. There was a raft of these "talking over beats" songs for a while. The last one I can recall was Baz Lurhman's 'Everybody's Free To Wear Sunscreen'.

Ask by The Smiths

It's hard to imagine now, just how ingrained the fear of nuclear apocalyse really was, in the 1980s.

Morrissey's chat-up line that "if it's not love, then it's the bomb that will bring us together" may seem extreme to today's listener. Back in the day, asking for a three minute fumble on the grounds that we might all be dead tomorrow, was pretty much a valid argument.

Even Prince (whom is the reason we're all here at The Org) had a number of apocalyptic songs... 'Ronnie Talk To Russia'... '1999'... 'Sign O' The Times'... You know, it wasn't unusual for a popular act to sing about impending destruction. I just can't imagine Beyoncé or Justin Timberlake singing about nuclear war anytime soon.

I love the phased harmonica on this song. And the claps.

It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) by R.E.M.

I can't help thinking that this is Michael Stipe taking the piss out of all the snuff songs of the time. It doesn't really seem to be about anything - but that doesn't make it any less valid than the other songs which purported to cite reasons for our apparent demise.

99 Red Balloons by Nena

An apocalyptic classic! Kids buy 99 red balloons, blow them up and set them adrift. Meanwhile an air base goes on red alert, believing the balloons to be an air strike from an undisclosed enemy.

If any song sums-up how kids felt about the Cold War, it's this one. The slightest mistake could result in doom. Standing on a crack in the pavement could cause nuclear war. Looking at someone the wrong way could cause nuclear war!!!

If children of the 1980s weren't traumatised enough by TV films like The Day After or Threads, this sent them over the edge. Even balloons were a threat.

I love the way she sings "super hi-tech jet fighters".

Two Tribes by Frankie Goes To Hollywood

From the air-raid sirens in the 12" version to the bass-line which sounds like the jingle to a news broadcast. This was the apex of all the scary nuclear war songs. One of the extended mixes actually features real audio clips from a Governmental emergency broadcast film, advising how to survive a nuclear holocaust.

The video was amazing. Lookalikes of Chernenko fighting Reagan in hand-to-hand combat.

The bloody single sleeve was scary - let alone the actual song...



It stayed at #1 in the U.K. Singles Chart for nine consecutive weeks. That's the weird thing about these songs - they were hugely popular!!!

Dancing With Tears In My Eyes by Ultravox

A love song about a relationship ending... Nothing weird about that, until you listen to the lyrics in the verses. The relationship is ending because the bloody world is ending!!!

The video to this song was especially terrifying. There's a depiction of a nuclear reactor going into meltdown - which terified me as a child when they showed it on Top Of The Pops.

Lead singer, Midge Ure, went on to save the world, by forming the Band Aid trust with Bob Geldolf, which lead to 'Do They Know It's Christmas', 'We Are The World' and the Live Aid concert of 1985.

It's Alright by Pet Shop Boys

Finally, some common sense. If we all die tomorrow, at least the music on the radio might be picked-up by another world on "a timeless wavelength"... Although, any alien race will probably deduce that we were fucking insane after listening to all these songs.

"I hope it's going to be alright" sings Neil Tennant. Not "it will" or "it won't" - but "I hope". It was a slight change of view, but a huge optimistic shift as I reached my mid-teens.

And as the eighties drew to a close, dance music overtook songs with lyrical stories, as the primary pop confection of the masses.

Epilogue

It's telling that I started off with twenty songs, to whittle down to these ten. And it really didn't take any research to find twenty 1980s songs about armageddon. I knew each song intimately, as each had terrified me as a child.

Even innocuous songs like Europe's 'The Final Countdown' (which is ostensibly about evacuating humankind from the Earth to travel to Venus) had sinister overtones to me. Blondie's 'Atomic' too... Seemingly about nothing more than having beautiful hair - but just the mention of the word "Atomic" petrified me as a youngster.

I hope you like the mix. I think dragging these songs into the open has been cathartic for me. Most are downright silly in retrospect.

If you'd like to hear an extended 80 minute compilation, featuring other "stunning gems" like Culture Club's 'The War Song' and Mike & The Mechanics' 'Silent Running', send me a p.m.

.
[Edited 2/22/10 10:03am]

GirlBrother said:

that is SOOOO true
I've already told the story many times of how our vice-principal prayed over the PA "may we live to see tomorrow" when Ronnie declared war on Libya and we all cried ourselves to sleep that night and our parents overwhelmed the school the next morning with angry phonecalls. Also showing kids "Threads" and "The Day After" during class it really WAS scary, we thought the bomb was gonna drop any moment

ZombieKitten said:

But I can't quite put my finger on why all these songs were so popular. Was it art reflecting the paranoia of the people? Or were these songs part of the problem?

You look back at other periods of political unrest, and aside from Vietnam (which had it's own fair share of songs), the cold war of the 1980s seemed to spawn a disproportionate number of "message songs".

Were any of these songs hits outside of the U.K.?

GirlBrother said:

it's like anything - defusing the fear I guess? Making it a little bit fashionable, a little easier to bear?
of those songs on your list there are only about 4 that I'd not heard before, Russians, 99 Luftballons and Two Tribes also massive hits here, REM too always on the radio.

Love Eighth Day - today is the first time I hear that song that style of zany Lene Lovich style vocal (nobody sings like that any more ) almost at odds with the content, which now becomes stylised comic book sci-fi as opposed to the gritty pain of war as depicted by 70s war protest music. Nothing like a dose of "I'm so weird!"

Wow. What a thoughtful mix. Many American kids I know who grew up in the '80s shared this sentiment of terror... as did I. It's really something to find out that feeling of dread was shared by kids outside of the country. I wonder if it has made us better or worse citizens of the world.

I'm anxious to hear this mix.

ZombieKitten said:

It's positively gleeful - which of course makes it scarier!

Lammastide said:

I can only talk from personal experience, but in many ways, I think anybody in their late thirties to early forties shares a sensibility that I can't quite articulate. It's not a carelessness; more of a "why worry?" frame of mind.

I flew on a plane three days after 9/11 and my parents were aghast. My mother didn't speak to me for a good few days and when she finally did, she muttered something about my having "a death wish".

When your time is up, your time is up. I think that we're stronger for having lived through the 1980s Cold War as children. When you've lived through that level of terror, everything else is just a picnic by comparison.

Lammastide said:

I'm anxious for a sticky.

GirlBrother said:

Don't worry. You'll get one. Have you dropped the M:NonP mods a request via orgnote?

Lammastide said:

Um... No. I figured it would just happen.

Sander said:

GirlBrother said:

oh I thought it was just automatic too

GirlBrother said:

I alerted them. They don't give a *&%^$ about us and our music

ZombieKitten said:

I notified them to stick yours too They'll unstick yours though because they don't want too much sticky clutter

SupaFunkyOrgangrinderSexy said:

how dare they!

thank you!!!

ZombieKitten said:

That's what I said. They don't care about me either

You're welcome I mean business when it comes to stuff like this. working behind the scenes to make sure things go right

SupaFunkyOrgangrinderSexy said:

I breathe 80's LOL, so Iam gonna like this mix alot.

Listening to this now... interesting subject matter bytheway. Iam going to take the songs as they are though, and not what they conjure up lyrically LOL.

1) "Eighth Day"-Hazel O'Connor. Decent pop song. Never heard it before.

2) "Russians"-Sting. Not one of my all time fav Sting songs, but its probably one of my favs from that album. Love the mood of it and how Russian the melody sounds.

3) "The Visitors (Crackin' Up)"-ABBA. Never dug Abba, but have always been interested in their last album as they seemed to be at the forefront of all those fairlights or whatever sequencers european producers like Georgio Moroder, Harold Faltermeyer etc.. were using. Very cold and very different sorta synths to the stuff Prince and Stevie Wonder etc.. were using in America at around that time. I loved an instrumental passage (or motif or whatever) that was half way through the song, but otherwise, at first hearing, its too long and meandering for me. Very interesting song sonically though. Its a shame Abba didn't continue going this synthy route (I know they broke up LOL).

4) "People Are Still Having Sex"-La Tour. I got a few things like this. Technotronic, Mr Lee etc... Has a sample of Guy's "teddy jam" aswell. Always a bonus with me. I like this song a lot. Nice one!

5) "Ask"-The Smiths. Love the reverby guitars on this one. Very 80s LOL, but is something I use to overlook as I don't really like the Smiths at all. I just cant get past Morriseys voice. Its dull as hell. All in the same tone. So instrumentally, its great LOL. Well produced and well mixed too. Very slick, which agains means very 80's LOL.

6) "It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)"-R.E.M. Great song. I still hear this sometimes. Production is not that much different to The Smiths actually.

7) "99 Red Balloons"-Nena. I don’t understand this. I swear the version I sometimes still hear on the radio is the German version? Same with the music video. Am I dreaming this? Which version do or did UK radio play? Anyway classic song. Prefer the German version though for some reason? Love the funky breakdowns.

8) "Two Tribes (For The Victims Of Ravishment)"-Frankie Goes To Hollywood. Still played a lot on oldies radio stations in the UK. MASSIVE HIT at the time. Horn is a producing genius. Not as good as “relax” though, but not many pop songs are in my book LOL. The musicianship on this track is superb. Love the sound of it all.

9) "Dancing With Tears In My Eyes"-Ultravox. Always loved this song. I need to buy some Ultravox. I remember him doing this at Live Aid (I grew up watching that concert LOL), and it sounded pretty good actually to my surprise (synth drenched music, to me, is hard to recapture at stadiums I feel). Lots of songs sounded like this in the 80’s, but I feel Ultravox were influential.

10) "It's Alright"-Pet Shop Boys. Barely have any of their music, and had never heard this song until now. Love the intro. Shame the song didn’t continue on that way LOL. Is this a remix? Sounds like something Shep might of done in the late 80’s? This is a complete guess but anyway. Lovely, uplifting song, and reminds me to dig a lot deeper into their discography. Great track to end on aswell.

Great mix. I enjoyed it lot and will be playing it again soon. Thanks.

thesexofit said:

I know!!! Just as they were getting good

I love this song, probably my fave ABBA track actually, I only discovered it when ABBA released their remasters in the 90s, it sounded so modern in style.

SupaFunkyOrgangrinderSexy said:

thesexofit said:

Yeah, that's why I put them together. They both sort of jangle along.

thesexofit said:

The U.K. radio version was the English-lyric version I've uploaded. Although I do recall the German-language version being played as well.

thesexofit said:

I now detest Trevor Horn, after what Wendy & Lisa said about him recently. I just couldn't overlook this track though.

thesexofit said:

It's the album version, from Introspective. All the songs on the album are extremely lengthy. I prefer it over the Radio Edit. I know nine minutes is a tad excessive, but I don't think it overstays its welcome. I find it really uplifting too. Uplifting, yet wistful.

actually when we were listening to this yesterday, the master actually said that the smiths song made him want to listen to REM, and then the next song WAS the one he wanted to hear!

ZombieKitten said:

It's the flooooowwwww... If I heard 'Ask' on the radio, the next song I'd want to hear would be 'It's The End Of The World As We Know It'. They complement each other well.

GirlBrother said:

when I was a kid, I'd make my mixtapes manually the old fashioned way



and you do it a song at a time, decide when one song finished what you wanted to hear next. TOTALLY flow